AESTHETICS OF DEFAMILIARIZATION IN HEIDEGGER, DUCHAMP, AND PONGE A DISSSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES Elizabeth R. Romanow December 2013 © 2013 by Elizabeth Rachel Romanow. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/cj591yd1063 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannes Gumbrecht, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Vincent Barletta I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Roland Greene Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii Acknowledgements This work would not have been the thesis it is today if it were not for the support, guidance, and inspiration of countless individuals. I cannot adequately express my gratitude for the team of scholars who helped guide me through this program, support my research, and hone my thinking. They were the major advisors on this dissertation, and I cannot begin to express the depth of my gratitude. These individuals are Roland Greene, who I first met during a transatlantic renaissance, and who immediately intrigued me with his handle on lively class discussion; Vincent Barletta, who guided me through medieval literature and who helped me pursue some of my earliest theory work; and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who has helped me in countless ways, both in the classroom and out, in the Philosophical Reading Group each week and in our first seminar together, when he first introduced me to Ponge. If it were not for their continual dedication, support, advising, and criticisms of my work, I would not have been able to complete this project. I am extremely thankful to Todd Kuebler and Margaret Tompkins, as well as the department of Comparative Literature, including David Palumbo-Liu and Russell Berman, at Stanford University, for providing such an intellectually stimulating environment and (ultimately) giving me the independence and freedom to pursue my work. Special thank you goes to Héctor Hoyos, with whom I worked on Duchamp, and to Monica Moore and Gregory (Grisha) Freidin of the program in Humanities as well for supporting my interdisciplinary efforts. I owe a debt to Bill Egginton, my master’s thesis director, and Richard Macksey and Thomas Dechand, Honors Program in Humanistic Studies advisors at The Johns Hopkins University, as well as the students in their seminar for working with me as my thesis developed. I am also grateful to a number of other professors who have influenced me, at both Stanford and Johns Hopkins, where I started my work on Heidegger: Hayden White, John T. Irwin, Eduardo González, Xavier Antich, Peggy Phalen, Simon Jarvis, Michael Perry, Daniela DeSilva, Qiao Zhang, Patricia Parker, and Monica Greenleaf. I am thankful, in particular, to Kimia Habibi, but also to my friends, for their support as well as my mother and brother. And lastly (and again), I am forever grateful for Bill, for first introducing me to Heidegger and philosophy, the world of ideas, and Sepp. If it were not for intriguing me with certain philosophical problems; for their guidance, comments, and feedback; for continually serving as mentors for me, and their unexhaustable source of inspiration; I would not be where I am today. Bill gave me more than he ever expected; and if I can do for one person what he did for me, that is to have succeeded. This thesis is dedicated to him. i Table of Contents ABSTRACT 1 I. INTRODUCTION. A Perspective on Defamiliarization 3 II. CHAPTER ONE. Heidegger 26 III. CHAPTER TWO. Duchamp 65 IV. CHAPTER THREE. Ponge 91 V. CONCLUSION 116 VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY 142 ii Aesthetics of Defamiliarization in Heidegger, Duchamp and Ponge Abstract Victor Shklovsky’s of ostranenie, estrangment or defamiliarization, may be useful for understanding a broad range of artistic strategies in twentieth century art and aesthetics. Heidegger’s theory of art, when read in light of his existential ontology in Being and Time, which is also a social theory, can be understood as providing a philosophical account of defamiliarization as having significance for both an ethics and an aesthetics. Duchamp’s “readymades,” with their interrogation of the idea of art and the institutions and practices to which it belongs, derive their critical and experiential force from their effectiveness in rendering unfamiliar or strange a quotidian object that is industrially fabricated; in Duchamp’s case, this raises a multiplicity of questions. While Duchamp negates the aesthetic notion of art, Ponge defamiliarizes everyday objects in order to consecrate them, and with them, the everyday life in which they are embedded, through an aesthetic gaze. These examples are useful in the effort to theorize defamiliarization and contextualize it historically as a politically as well as ethically significant tendency. An historical perspective on the theory of Heidegger this dissertation imputes to Heidegger suggests that this theory is a theory of crisis rooted in an experience of a crisis of modernity that was especially acute in Europe between the wars. In particular, Heidegger situates human existence between two absolutes: that of an organic community that is prior to all difference and all thought, and that of a heroic subjectivity, who may well be an avatar of the Kantian artist as a genius who is not bound by any rules, impossibly deworlded and desituated, metaphysically homeless. Romanow 1 I. INTRODUCTION. A Perspective on Defamiliarization The concept of defamiliarization was first introduced into literary study and named as such by the Russian formalists, in particular Viktor Shklovsky, who coined the term ostranenie in 1917 in his essay “Art as Technique,” and defined defamiliarization as a process of making the familiar and everyday appear strange with the purpose that the work of art is the renewal of perception, the seeing of the world suddenly in a new light, in a new and unforeseen way (Jameson 52). In a literary context, defamiliarization causes the audience to confront an object on a different level, elevating and transforming it from something ordinary or practical into something extraordinary, which is considered art. According to Shklovsky: In our phonetic and lexical investigations into poetic speech, involving both the arrangement of words and the semantic structures based on them, we discover everywhere the very hallmark of the artistic: that is, an artifact that has been intentionally removed from the domain of automatized perception. It is “artificially” created by an artist in such a way that the perceiver, pausing in his reading, dwells on the text (Shklovsky, 12). In Shklovsky’s view, art—while always a matter of conventional devices—demands that the artist resist automatic recognition and employ defamiliarization to make some unconventional employment of one or more of the artwork’s devices. The aim of defamiliarization is to set the mind in a state of unpreparedness, to put into question the conventionality of our perceptions. By “making strange,” the artist forces the reader or viewer’s mind to rethink its situation in the world. Shklovsky states that poetic language is fundamentally different than the quotidian, colloquial language of everyday particularly because it is more difficult to understand: Poetic speech is framed speech. Prose is ordinary speech—economical, easy, proper, the goddess of prose is a goddess of the accurate, facile type, of the “direct” expression of a child (Shklovsky 20). Romanow 2 This difference is the key to the coming into being of art (as defamiliarization) and the prevention of “over automatization,” which causes an individual to react to images, objects, and stimuli according to preconceived notions and assumed perceptions. Shklovsky’s definition of art as an inherently defamiliarizing agent finds echoes in the works of Heidegger, Duchamp, and Ponge. According to Shklovsky: The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged (Shklovsky 16). Heidegger emphasized the truth is defamiliarizing, and that is above all through artworks that it is revealed. Duchamp, whose most notable works for the purpose of this study were produced during and directly after World War I—several even before the publication of Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique”—can be said to have pioneered in the modern art world the “technique of art [to] make objects ‘unfamiliar,’” pushing his audience to question: What is an object when its utility is removed? Does it become aesthetic? Can it still be utilitarian without its original function? Why can’t it be “art?” What is art? Chronologically and philosophically following Heidegger and Duchamp, Ponge builds upon Shklovsky’s definition of art as something that prolongs perception, primarily through his novel technique of prolonged but unadorned description of the seemingly mundane.